


i'm the light blinking at the end of the road

by ScreechTheMighty



Series: Talk Some Sense To Me [6]
Category: Apex Legends (Video Games)
Genre: Angst, F/M, I'd tag Wraith but she has like five lines, Pining, Rated for swearing, Secret Crush, Self Loathing, no beta reader we die like men, wrote this instead of sleeping
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-01
Updated: 2019-09-01
Packaged: 2020-10-04 14:42:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,705
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20472728
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ScreechTheMighty/pseuds/ScreechTheMighty
Summary: blink back to let me know(it was always you)Elliott thinks about some things. An immediate follow-up and companion toi've walked with you once upon a dream.





	i'm the light blinking at the end of the road

**Author's Note:**

> Note that since this IS an immediate follow-up to "i've walked with you once upon a dream", you may want to read it first. "Je n'ai qu'un seul et unique regret" is also a good pre-game read if you haven't already read it, as I reference some headcanons from that fic in this one. Also, I apologize for the feels, and also the delay. I keep hitting deadlines and also procrastinating by playing Apex. I got the Mirage emote. It's adorable.

It was damn near three in the morning but Elliott couldn’t sleep.

He probably should’ve; he was still shaken and sore after their match, and tired as all hell. But Wraith had asked him to stay. She may not have _meant_ for him to stay this late, but she’d finally fallen asleep and he didn’t want her to wake up alone. She hated the hospital. That was why he’d agreed to stay.

Elliott was glad she was sleeping, he really was. She needed the rest, especially after the shots she’d taken. That said? Being alone with his thoughts sucked.

Especially when his mind kept circling back to the fact that he’d _tried to hold her hand._

He wasn’t sure what had possessed her to do that. Yes, he’d been crushing on her hard for weeks. Yes, said crushing was starting to get painful. But he’d been able to keep things on the DL so far and was _perfectly_ fine with that. Everything had been _fine._

_Sure blew that one out of the water, huh?_

Maybe not. Maybe she hadn’t noticed. It had been a moment of duress when a team mate—no, a friend, he was pretty sure they were _friendly_ now—was injured. She could’ve taken it to be a panic response, just…purely platonic hand-holding.

Elliott groaned quietly. _Purely platonic hand-holding._ Right. Because that was a thing.

The one thing worse than the embarrassment at his social faux paus was the repeated thought that maybe he _shouldn’t _be embarrassed by it. She hadn’t immediately freaked out. That had to be a good sign. At the very least, the incident had proved he could only keep his stupid crush secret for so long. Elliott was honestly shocked that she hadn’t noticed yet. He might have been a trickster on the battlefield, but when it came to interpersonal relationships, he was subtle as a brick to the face.

_If I just told her, maybe…_

Now _that_ was crazy talk. Crazy talk brought on by the fact that he was rapidly approaching 24 hours without sleep and had nearly watched Wraith bleed to death in front of him.

_It can’t hurt to **try,**_ _right?_

Damn his fucking stupid inner optimist trying to get him to _try things._

He had left Wraith’s side _very_ briefly earlier to get changed and grab food; he’d grabbed his tablet while he was out, just in case he wanted to listen to music or video chat Mom once Wraith had fallen asleep. He had done neither of those things, but he was glad he’d grabbed it. Elliott brought up the document editor and typed at the top _Pro-Con List: Telling Wraith I Love Her._

He went back in and edited “love” to “like.” No sense in being dramatic.

Pros list first. Always start positive. _You won’t have to hold on to it anymore. Her hearing it from you is better than you embarrassing yourself_.

That was probably his strongest reason to tell her. Especially when Octane might’ve known. Elliott didn’t trust him to keep that shit to himself forever. The bastard would let something slip eventually, and it would be mortifying. Better she hear it from him.

_She hugged you._

That was true. She had hugged him. He thought about it constantly.

_She’s been nice to you lately. She’s been smiling at you._

She had. She’d been smiling at him a lot, actually. Now that he thought about it, he was tempted to say that _he_ was the cause of most of her smiling lately. That was probably egotistical. He didn’t write it down, but he was going to think it.

_She doesn’t mind being around you._

Also true. It used to be that Wraith did everything alone but fight. She had recently, though, come around, and of her own volition too. They hung out in the break rooms together, they had meals together, he’d braided her hair…_oh yeah, that!_ He put that on the list too: _She let you in her room/let her tough her hair. _That was kind of a big deal, right? It meant that she trusted him, right? Trust was a great precursor to a potential relationship.

_You’re thirty years old and you should know what you’re doing right now._

Should. That was the word that made him pause.

_You don’t know what you’re doing._

He wrote that in the cons list, then deleted it. Nope. Nope, he might’ve had a cons list, but he was trying to be positive. Positive-ish. As positive as you can get with a cons list.

Were there any real cons?

_It’s just as likely you were in a moment of emotional duress and she just wanted to make you feel better as a friend._

_She could be nice to you because she values you as a team mate but not as a person._

_She was desperate and you were the only person she had to talk to._

The fact that he could so easily crank out counter-points to his previous points actually made him queasy. He tried again with something in the pros.

_She might be willing to give a relationship a try if she likes you as a friend. _That was a thing that happened.

And immediately, the cons: _That’s literally never worked out for you ever._

Then, _No relationship has ever worked out for you._

It was _true,_ but he hated that he _remembered that._ That he was thinking about it _right now,_ when he was trying not to focus on soul-crushing defeatist attitudes.

_Defeatist or realistic?_

He stewed on that for a bit.

It was true. He’d never had a successful relationship. And another thing for the cons list was that Wraith _hated_ his Mirage persona. She might have been okay with him, but any time he went to put on a show, he could _feel her_ rolling her eyes in the background. Typically he went in with Mirage, but this time he’d have to go in with himself if he even wanted a _shot._ And…

_Who gives a shit about Elliott?_

The embarrassment parade of failures rushed into his mind. Lucy when he was a teenager. Susan when he was older. Every time he’d been told he was a nice enough guy _but_. You’re a great guy _but._ Every time he’d been laughed at behind his back because of his stutter or because he’d said something stupid. Being asked to say long words that he couldn’t figure out no matter how hard he tried and how clearly he pictured the word in his mind. The whole damn _pumpkin fucker_ gag. It felt like huge portions of his life just consisted of him being laughed at. Even _now_, when he was thirty years old and successful in the games, he _knew_ what some people thought of him.

The times Caustic had called him a simpleton.

The times Bangalore had looked at him like he’d grown an extra head.

Every time a reporter asked him about some stupid thing he’d said because sometimes he couldn’t make his thoughts make sense to other people, shit he said made perfect sense to him but whenever he tried to make it make sense to other people it just came out as _gibberish,_ because it didn’t _fucking matter_ that he could explain how a holographic decoy worked or disassemble the tech itself blindfolded, none of that mattered because he was _so fucking **stupid**…_

Elliott realized he was tearing up. _You’re crying? Really? You’re really crying right now, you fucking **wimp? **_He went to desperately scrub the tears away and dropped his tablet in the process.

Because _of course he did_.

“_Fuck_,” Elliott muttered as he leaned over to pick it up. “_Shit, _fucking idiot…”

When he straightened up, a pair of blue eyes was staring at him in confusion. “…you’re still here?” Wraith asked.

_Good job, idiot, you woke her up._

“Yeah, I mean…I just thought…y’know, I know the uhm, I know it freaks you out in here…” Elliott rubbed his eyes, hoping that she mistook the redness in them for exhaustion. “I didn’t want you to…to wake up alone.” She kept staring at him, which made him nervous, which meant his mouth kept going. “Guess I’m not that good at sleeping in chairs, huh?”

_Shut up, shut up, shut up…!_

He couldn’t tell, but it almost looked like Wraith smiled. Just for a second. “You know there’s another bed in the room, right?” she said.

Elliott turned around. Sure enough…there was a second bed in the room. That he had somehow forgotten about.

“…yeah, I guess there is. Uh…” Elliott laughed shakily and stood up. “Thanks for p-pointing out the obvious.”

“You’re tired. Don’t beat yourself up.” Wraith pulled the covers higher up to her chin. This time, he knew she was smiling. “Sleep, okay? I’m all right.”

“I will. I promise.”

He thought she was going to say something else. Instead, she half-buried her face in the covers and closed her eyes again. He was pretty sure she was asleep by the time he got his boots off and lay down.

_Maybe she won’t remember any of this in the morning._ Shit, he hoped not.

Elliott closed his eyes, but he couldn’t sleep. His mind immediately wandered back to the question of his feelings—of the way his heart kept racing at the memory of her smile.

She didn’t—couldn’t—like Mirage. But even if she had been kind to Elliott so far, there was no way she’d love him once she got to know him. No one did, except his own mother. Maybe his brothers, if they were still alive. He could give it a try, but she’d be sick of him within a month.

No sense in getting his heart broken. Or getting it more broken than he already had. He could keep it together. He’d get over her.

Deep down, he knew that wasn’t true, but he had to. He didn’t have any choice.

The next morning, when he woke up, Wraith was already looking better. Elliott managed to convince himself that the happiness he felt at the sight had nothing to do with his crush.

He knew that wasn’t true, either.

**Author's Note:**

> Title is taken from "Always" by Panic! at the Disco. I'm on tumblr as screechthemighty for my main and respawncinematicuniverse for all my Apex/Titanfall fics and posts (because shit doesn't show up in the tag sometimes and it's Annoying).


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